April 22nd, 2012
Third Sunday of Easter
Luke 24:36-49
Repentance and Forgiveness of Sins
Jesus, having risen from the dead and now glorified, was no longer limited by the bounds of time and space, as He was during the time of His humiliation. While living on the earth, subjecting Himself to the restrictions of a normal human body He “emptied Himself” of His glory and set aside the use of His divine omnipresence, and so on.
On this occasion, which was the evening of Easter Sunday, the doors of the upper room where the disciples were gathered were firmly locked. And yet suddenly, there Jesus stood in their midst, and was speaking to them.
When I was a child I thought that meant that He could just walk through walls, now. But as an adult I realized something even more wonderful than that was going on. Since Jesus, God the Son, is already omnipresent (He is everywhere at the same time), He didn’t need to go through the walls, because He was already there in the room when they closed the door! All He had to do was let them see him. And that’s what He did; He simply quit being invisible to them for a moment.
Jesus showed Himself to His disciples and proved to them that He had really risen from the dead, not just spiritually or metaphysically, but His actual physical body. That real, physical body, which even though a moment before and a moment later they couldn’t see it, was just as solid as the walls or the table of that room. They could touch Him, they could see and feel that He was really flesh and bone. He ate real physical food while they watched Him chew and swallow it.
Why was that important? Why did Jesus go to such lengths to demonstrate that His resurrection was a real, physical, material one?
God wants you to know that when He talks about the resurrection, He doesn’t mean that you will be “ascended to a higher spiritual plane” or hang around as a ghost, or that you’ll be reincarnated and come back to earth as somebody or something else. Just like Jesus, you will rise from the dead and it will be in the same body as you have now, only better.
The Bible says that we don’t know everything about this. Not that God doesn’t know, but that God has chosen to not reveal everything about this, all the details, to us. We don’t need to know more than what He has said in His Word about it. For now, we know all we need to know, if we will only read His Word.
There’s something else here, too. The laws of the physical universe, (which are, after all, His laws) state that omnipresence and invisibility are physically impossible. The disciples needed to know - just as we also need to know - that the same Jesus who had eaten and walked with them was just as present with each one of them now as He had been for the previous three years, even though now they couldn’t see Him most of the time.
That was important, because He was about to send them out on a mission.
Jesus explained how the Old Testament Scriptures had been fulfilled all through His life, and in His death and resurrection. He “opened their minds,” the Bible says, taking away the veil that had kept them from understanding the plain sense of the Scriptures as they read it before, and He told them that now that all these other prophecies had been fulfilled, the time was now here for the next step: that from that moment on, two things were to be proclaimed all over the world - in every nation of mankind - in His name: repentance and the forgiveness of sins.
This is the message that we are called and commissioned to communicate. We call it the Law and the Gospel. We don’t send missionaries out all over the world to teach people how to be Americans. We aren’t spreading the light of western culture and democracy, flush toilets and modern medicine. The Christian Church is not a political pressure group or a voting bloc.
Our commission is to proclaim the Word of God that saves, delivers, and sets people free: the Word that calls us away from our sin to a new, holy life, and that offers and gives us God’s promise of forgiveness for everything we’ve done to drive Him away from us.
All through the ages we Christians have had the tendency to forget one half or the other of this two-pronged message. We either preach repentance and forget to preach the forgiveness of sins; or we preach forgiveness of sins and forget to call people to repentance.
It seems to go in waves. For a few years the tendency - the fashion - will be to emphasize the repentance part, the Law, and forget to communicate the sweet message of the Gospel, the complete and total forgiveness of all our sins. The message gets warped into one that tells everyone that they can never be good enough to be acceptable to God, much less loved and saved by Him. We spend all our energy trying to correct people’s behavior and forget to communicate the love and forgiveness of God that their hearts are longing to hear.
Then for another few years, the fashion changes, and we will preach the forgiveness part only, until the message of the church seems to be nothing more than the pop psychology approach, “I’m okay; you’re okay, ” which means, ”Don’t worry about repentance; don’t take sin so seriously; God accepts you just as you are and He doesn’t care about your sin. It’s okay. Everything’s fine; nothing’s going to happen. God isn’t mad at you.”
Some groups of Christians are known for only emphasizing the repentance part, while other groups of Christians, some congregations or whole denominations, become known for only talking about the forgiveness part. And both groups become proud of the fact that they only talk about one half of the message - not like “those other Christians” who only talk about the other half!
Both parts of the message are necessary; both the Law and the Gospel. We all need to hear both halves of the message every day.
We all need to be called over and over again to repentance, because we seem to fall over and over again into “the sin that so easily besets us.” Even when we overcome old sinful habits, our sinful hearts find new ones to develop, and we need the Holy Spirit to come through His Word and point them out to us, and call us again to repentance.
And we all need to be reminded over and over again that Jesus has already paid for our sins; that they are all forgiven, every single one of them, because Jesus has died and risen again for us; because without that we all tend to look inwardly at our own unworthiness and fall into despair and discouragement and even more sin.
And so, in Jesus’ name; leave your sin behind. Repent of whatever He points out to you as sin. Rededicate yourself again today to holy living, in Jesus’ name.
And in Jesus’ name, hear this: your sins, though they are many, are forgiven, washed away in the blood of the Lamb of God. Jesus has died for you and His forgiveness is yours. Receive it now and be cleansed, healed and delivered.